Movie Review – Inland Empire

Royally Lynched

Just like anyone who’d venture into this movie I too jumped into it knowing what my experience would be when I come out of it. When you compare with this film, ‘Mulholland Drive’ is of different category. There at least you’ll be glued to the screen, there will be certain interest in what was going to happen next. But here the experience was something different. It’s a sort of dangerous curiosity which you can’t evade. Add a couple of panic attacks in between. A perfect recipe for the Lynch film.

Not much can be discussed from the story point of view. I didn’t understand a thing. It’s more about experience. How horrific it can go with time. The movie has an opening on the lines of ‘Persona’. If there were filaments of fire there, here was the close up of discs which keep appearing again and again then goes to a place where a couple, supposedly a man and a whore have sex, followed by someone watching the TV and in the TV are few people with bunny heads. Every one of the scenes in unsettling one after other. It was tough to watch as such and on top of it I had the problem of syncing subtitles. I thought it was only English so thought of watching without subs but as the film had Polish language too, I had to download it. To watch the same horrific scenes in repeat mode to sync the subtitles made my anxiety go one notch above.

The whole film was made with extreme close ups and angles which invoke anxiety in the user. The Polish woman (Grace Zabriskie) especially induces horror just through her looks at Nikki Grace (Laura Dern). Wonder how Lynch is so effective in making everything a horror product just through camera techniques. There were hardly any graphics used in the film. Post that everything was just hazy.

Let me talk about couple of interesting scenes. One would definitely be the scene where Nikki dies, which we think it as reality but ends up being a movie scene. To identify what’s what is nearly impossible. If you are trying, best of luck for that. May be through multiple watching, things could be uncovered but this film is not meant to be watched a number of times. It’s an experience of lifetime. If you think more carefully about the movies that you don’t want to watch again, there would be movies where you won’t remember the story but still feel like you know something and you don’t want to watch it. That’s called the feel of the movie. When I think of ‘Dreamers’ I don’t remember the story but I remember the feel so I don’t need to watch. When I think of ‘Crimes and misdemeanors’ I remember more about that film than ‘Dreamers’ but I would want to re watch ‘Crimes and misdemeanors’ again because I’ve forgot how I felt about the movie. That’s the thing with ‘Inland Empire’, just like ‘Mulholland Drive’ its better to be relished (tortured) once and leave it as such instead of re watching and trying to unravel more.

There have been a number of film in films and number of films which was haunted. This clubs both of it but instead and gives a different treatment. Even though there are horror films in similar genre, people love them. Even though they’re scared, they’re happy. Just like being in theme park. It gives them high. But Lynch has different ideas. His horror would be of the kind that you want to puke while watching and feel short of breath every now and then. That’s true horror right, something you don’t want to repeat.